Recent Articles

Preparing for the Future

It's Called Abstraction, and It's a Good Thing

by Remy Porter
in Feature Articles
on 2018-02-15

Steven worked for a company that sold “big iron” to big companies, for big bucks. These companies didn’t just want the machines, though, they wanted support. They wanted lots of support. With so many systems, processing so many transactions, installed at so many customer sites, Steven’s company needed a better way to analyze when things went squirrelly.

Thus was born a suite of applications called “DICS”- the Diagnostic Investigation Console System. It was, at its core, a processing pipeline. On one end, it would reach out to a customer’s site and download log files. The log files would pass through a series of analytic steps, and eventually reports would come out the other end. Steven mostly worked on the reporting side of things.

Budget Cuts

by Charles Robinson
in Feature Articles
on 2018-02-13

Xavier was the head of a 100+ person development team. Like many enterprise teams, they had to support a variety of vendor-specific platforms, each with their own vendor-specific development environment and its own licensing costs. All the licensing costs were budgeted for at year’s end, when Xavier would submit the costs to the CTO. The approval was a mere formality, ensuring his team would have everything they needed for another year.

Unfortunately, that CTO left to pursue another opportunity. Enter Greg, a new CTO who joined the company from the financial sector. Greg was a penny-pincher on a level that would make the novelty coin-smasher you find at zoos and highway rest-stops jealous. Greg started cutting costs left and right immediately. When the time came for budgeting development tool licensing, Greg threw down the gauntlet on Xavier’s “wild” spending.

If It's Stupid and It Works

by Remy Porter
in Coded Smorgasbord
on 2018-02-12

On a certain level, if code works, it can only be so wrong. For today, we have a series of code blocks that work… mostly. Despite that, each one leaves you scratching your head, wondering how, exactly this happened.

Whatever Happened to January 2nd?

I Take Exception

by snoofle
in CodeSOD
on 2018-02-08

We've all seen code that ignores errors. We've all seen code that simply rethrows an exception. We've all seen code that wraps one exception for another. The submitter, Mr. O, took exception to this exceptionally exceptional exception handling code.

I was particularly amused by the OutOfMemoryException handler that allocates another exception object, and if it fails, another layer of exception trapping catches that and attempts to allocate yet another exception object. if that fails, it doesn't even try. So that makes this an exceptionally unexceptional exception handler?! (ouch, my head hurts)

How To Creat Socket?

by Remy Porter
in CodeSOD
on 2018-02-07

JR earned a bit of a reputation as the developer who could solve anything. Like most reputations, this was worse than it sounded, and it meant he got the weird heisenbugs. The weirdest and the worst heisenbugs came from Gerry, a developer who had worked for the company for many, many years, and left behind many, many landmines.

Once upon a time, in those Bad Old Days, Gerry wrote a C++ socket-server. In those days, the socket-server would crash any time there was an issue with network connectivity. Crashing services were bad, so Gerry “fixed” it. Whatever Gerry did fell into the category of “good enough”, but it had one problem: after any sort of network hiccup, the server wouldn’t crash, but it would take a very long time to start servicing requests again. Long enough that other processes would sometime fail. It was infrequent enough that the bug had stuck around for years, but finally, someone wanted Something Done™.

For Want of a CR…

by snoofle
in Feature Articles
on 2018-02-06

A few years ago I was hired as an architect to help design some massive changes to a melange of existing systems so a northern foreign bank could meet some new regulatory requirements. As a development team, they gave me one junior developer with almost a year of experience. There were very few requirements and most of it would be guesswork to fill in the blanks. OK, typical Wall Street BS.

The junior developer was, well, junior, but bright, and he remembered what you taught him, so there was a chance we could succeed.

PRINCESS DEATH CLOWNS

by Remy Porter
in CodeSOD
on 2018-02-05

Adam recently tried to claim a rebate for a purchase. Rebate websites, of course, are awful. The vendor doesn’t really want you to claim the rebate, after all, so even if they don’t actively try and make it user hostile, they’re also not going to go out of their way to make the experience pleasant.

In Adam’s case, it just didn’t work. It attempted to use a custom-built auto-complete textbox, which errored out and in some cases popped up an alert which read: [object Object]. Determined to get his $9.99 rebate, Adam did what any of us would do: he started trying to debug the page.

The Biggest Loser

We Sell Bonds!

by Lorne Kates
in Feature Articles
on 2018-02-01

We Sell Bonds!

The quaint, brick-faced downtown office building was exactly the sort of place Alexis wanted her first real programming job to be. She took a moment to just soak in the big picture. The building's façade oozed history, and culture. The busy downtown crowd flowed around her like a tranquil stream. And this was where she landed right out of college-- if this interview went well.

Alexis went inside, got a really groovy start-up vibe from the place. The lobby slash waiting room slash employee lounge slash kitchen slash receptionist desk was jam packed full of boxes of paperwork waiting to be unpacked and filed (once a filing cabinet was bought). The walls, still the color of unpainted drywall, accented with spats of plaster and glue-tape. Everything was permeated with chaotic beginnings and untapped potential.